The thing is, this DRM stuff causes a lot of problems, like performance loss and even crashes. Therefore even honest buyers use the cracks, to get rid of it.
Some people even wait until the game appears DRM-free on GOG, because of this.
PC Gaming may be mainstream now but in its nerdier days awareness of cracking was quite high... and I imagine it still is among demographics that cannot afford to plunk down $60 for the latest whatever-they-want
Awareness of cracking is high, but if you own a PC that can play these games you can afford 60$ to pay for the game. Or you can just wait a little and get one of the millions of games on Steam for approximately no money.
You can put together a competent gaming PC for about $400 these days. Buy a refurb business desktop with a fourth-gen i5, add a GTX 1650 and you can run pretty much any game at 1080p on medium settings.
A lot of young people (or people in middle-income countries) can scrape together a few hundred bucks for an entry-level gaming PC, but would find a $60 game to be prohibitively expensive. IMO the move away from demo versions and physical media has substantially incentivised piracy - if you can't try before you buy and can't resell your game, you're less inclined to hand over your hard-earned cash for a game that you might hate.
Dude you obviously did not grow up on computer games, because if you did you may have saved up for that $500-$1000 gaming PC over a period of months (or years) and then had very little money left over or per month for games.
When I was younger I could barely afford a gaming PC and certainly didn't have very much money for games, and I knew a lot of other people in my boat. I lived for the bargain bin (and later, Steam Sales) and it was still not enough
In my group of friends, we tend not to buy any multi-player game with EA Origins requirement because 2 of my friends so vehemently oppose it that I already know that I would be playing alone if I bought it.
Users like to hate DRMs, even when it's not justified.
Technically Denuvo is not a DRM, it's an anti-tampering system. This is not just a matter of wording - nobody complains about Steam's DRM, so it's not about DRMs, it's about a specific product.
Regarding the crashes, there's much hearsay around. However, in absence of rigorous examinations, there's the benefit of doubt. In my opinion, it's not buggy in itself (I've played several games with Denuvo, and they were working fine), rather as the general bug risk of adding extra functionality to software. As the article above points, "[...] that would imply Denuvo checks constantly running within the main game loop, which would make no sense.".
All in all, defining Denuvo as "this DRM stuff causes a lot of problems" is definitely a mischaracterization, although it's not clear if "this DRM" refers to Denuvo, or DRMs in general.
Isn't "a lot of problems" somewhat of an exaggeration? I don't like DRM conceptually any more than I imagine most people do, but hasn't most people's ire with it been reddit-level sleuthing / whinging?
I have seen evidence that heavy DRM (Denuvo I think, specifically) caused increased loading times.
Apart from that, every time someone tries to prove there is any other difference with any measure of scientific rigour they find no statistically differences.
Overlord Gaming has done significant benchmarking with Denuvo and after the developer removed Denuvo. There's one on loading times [0]. And others on performance and disk size.
Loading times obviously varied per game, but the differences for most games were pretty significant.
For Denuvo they have been better lately at implementing the checks in a way where it does not interfere with performance or if it does, it is very difficult to detect.
But for DRM overall and Denuvo there are numerous issues, and thanks to the "make a game and forget it", principle they games continue to suffer from bad implementation. In particular games with the older iterations of Denuvo continue to have performance issues.
To expand upon this, the older a game continues to have DRM the more problems become apparent. For example just recently in December, where Disney's decision not to renew Securom caused legal owners Tron:Evolution to have their game stop working.[0]
Who knows what fate all those expensive Denuvo titles have in store for them, but we probably have a fair idea. Due to the resources needed to bypass more difficult DRM, often the updated version of the game will remain uncracked and that could make it possibly unplayable for the average consumer if things go south.
> Therefore even honest buyers use the cracks, to get rid of it.
How many of these cracks actually fully get rid of denuvo? I'm not familiar enough with current developments, but most DRM patches I've seen didn't actually get rid of the DRM.
I just wait for a GOG release, I'm patient and my game backlog is already way too long. No point in paying the full price if I can play something else I bought for cheap in the meantime.
I find the dynamic between passionate hackers doing it for free against paid DRM writers to be very interesting, gets to show you how passion for problem solving can sometimes trump people writing software for money no matter the money involved
Devs keep using denuvo though, precisely because crackers aren't trumping the denuvo devs.
Like, everything gets cracked at some point, that's not a failure. Denuvo holds up for months, and games are like movies in the sense that the opening week is really important, then everything trails off from there.
I think the 75 days is mostly due to games that nobody cares about. High profile games tend to be cracked within hours or days. For example, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order was already cracked by the time that my favorite gaming magazine printed their launch review.
That seems unlikely. If there were truly so many games nobody cared about then the underlying studios would go bust and stop applying DRM to anything, then fall out of the stats. Also these schemes aren't free so obviously the game companies cared enough to apply it.
For cases where these schemes have cracks days after release, it has historically meant the game was in the hands of crack teams quite a way before the release, usually due to corrupted insiders somewhere in the supply chain. DRM/anti piracy schemes are much more than the software you see on your computer, and the good ones have traitor tracing functionality so corrupted insiders can be found and fixed.
BTW 75 day lifetime for a DRM is about perfectly optimal. It looks like Denuvo have really hit it out of the ballpark if these stats are accurate.
Game/movie sales are very spiky. People wait for cracks but not very long. Most sales are within the first few days. A DRM that lasts even a week can be easily profitable for the firm using it as many will break down and buy the game rather than keep waiting. After a few months sales are reduced to a trickle and nobody cares if it gets hacked at that point.
The thing that most people miss about DRM is that not only is it very temporally dependent but being too strong is just as bad as being too weak. Due to the sales curve if your game DRM takes two years to crack despite huge attention from adversaries, then that implies you engaged in massive overkill. That almost certainly (in the PC space) means you wasted time that could have been spent on the game, or did things that hurt compatibility or would reduce sales in other ways.
The exception is when you have one DRM scheme for everything, like in games consoles. Then of course the cost of a break is much higher and the ROI of unbroken DRM is much higher. But the same principles still apply. For instance, cartridges were historically harder to clone than DVDs, and commodity DVD drives were less secure than the rest of the consoles, but the winning consoles used commodity storage tech anyway and accepted the reduction in security. It's all about ROI.
online multi-player games tend not to get cracked, because then you'd just get banned
I think that's another way of saying they're too hard to crack properly, i.e. the servers can always detect cracked copies of the game because the modifications aren't perfectly disguised.
I think it a grand irony that the only graphs on this page that aren't barely-interpretable depictions of category error are, of all things, the pie charts.
It's so bad; the curves are hurting my eyes... my favorite part is where the curves get clipped to a suddenly straight line. That only seems to happen when the numbers are the min/max of the data range. Whoever wrote this fitting algorithm needs to be drawn, quartered, and fashioned into a pie chart macabre.
It makes no sense to draw a (smoothed!) curve between e.g. 5 releases 450 days ago to 3 releases 420 days ago. The most charitable interpretation is that the y axis is releases/month, but (a) a rolling average would be a more appropriate visualization for that figure (b) the numbers are clearly actually just discrete releases ascribed each of the points at 30-day intervals (c) that's not what the label says anyway.
The other line graphs have basically the same problem.
Meanwhile, pie charts are infamous for being abused to show things that don't actually add up to 1, but in this case they're actually being used fairly appropriately.
Given the large number or urban legends about Denuvo I can only assume it’s a pain for the cracking community and given how widespread it is, it probably helps publishers.
Average cracking times are still way above 30 days which is the most crucial period.
Denuvo is based on VMProtect, at least in part, which implements DRM through virtualization and encryption of the original code. Since it takes days to "crack Denuvo", I'm guessing they are cracking the encryption key or doing some sort of statistical reassembly of the raw code from a sample base. In either case it doesn't sound like there are any insiders involved, no.
The back story is that at some point VMPSoft was suing Denovo for buying a single license of VMProtect and then using it to roll out their own DRM system. It was a complete LOL really. They ended up settling out of court.
If anything, insiders usually leak pre-release builds so crackers can start early.
Denuvo state themselves that it only protects for certain period not infinitely so probably it is just hackers not releasing cracks immediately due to multiple possible reasons:
1) legal action if published got his 2-3 months when sales are at peak they are less likely to go after the crackers
2) games are often released very buggy thanks to online
patching available, so they just wait for games to stabilize as not to update cracks weekly
3) less demand for cracks due to steam and sales, I feel like people wait for sales or prices to drop off in general
You are assuming that everyone purchasing a game, would not purchase it if they could download a pirated version. Call me naive, but I like to think that a lot of people that have the money to purchase a game in the first week, would still purchase it even if a cracked version is available. Just look at the billions of revenue earned by Spotify and iTunes before it, even if most music is available on release date (or even before the release date!) online without even needing cracks. I like to think that most (!) people pirating stuff, would not purchase the pirated product at all if no pirated version were available.
On the other hand, you seem to be missing the number of people just sick of DRM and all the hoops it makes you go through before actually being able to play a game. Some people may just start pirating games because the hoops of running a cracked version are easier than the hoops of running a legit version with all the DRM restrictions. Or they may just give on games altogether and decide to spend their valuable time and money on something else entirely.
So adding DRM may just as well be a net negative for game publishers.
I don't have the data to say which is correct, but just assuming that DRM is profitable because most sales happen in the first week, before a crack is available, seems a bit too simple.
Don’t forget about hyped up kids, they spend months posting to forums and Reddit about how (new game) will be the best thing ever. Then once they get a chance to play it are disappointed since it is impossible to live up to the expectations they have built up in their mind, then immediately move on to the next big thing.
Before it’s cracked they will probably buy it because of how excited they are and FOMO
Kids also don't have much money to buy games, and have lots of free time to figure out how to pirate them. Maybe some of them can convince their parents to buy it for them.
For me Buying a 60-80$ AAA game (I was a teen in the early 00s) by earning 5$ from time to time mowing the lawn or washing my dad's car was a hard sell. Even when I started working retail at min wage (7$), it was still a hard sell.
Games publishers have all the data you're talking about and much more. They've all mostly experimented with either no DRM on game releases or very trivial DRM, and have models that can predict quite accurately these days what investment into a protection will yield what sort of return.
I'm always shocked by the frequent assumption made by people in the software world that game/movie studios don't know what they're doing financially, despite decades of experience and being the world's biggest entertainment businesses. Of course they know.
> I like to think that a lot of people that have the money to purchase a game in the first week, would still purchase it even if a cracked version is available.
> It is still profitable to add Denuvo for game publishers, because most sales happen in the first week.
This is one of those "false wisdoms" which get perpetuated by DRM industry, very similar to creative accounting to calculate monetary losses due to piracy.
The numbers don't and never did really support this conclusion (even inside the industry). My first hand experience shows that DRM is pretty much about ass-covering between publishing industry and distribution channels - basically so everyone in the chain can say "we did all we could and added this amazing Denuvo thing that's certified by our amazing legal department as completely secure!" and concede the fault for percieved "lost sales" to someone else in meetings with management and board.
I don't think you can really tell from these stats. 120 days ago the mean cracking time was 73 days. Now it is over 75 days and rising. To estimate how long until cracking takes less than 7 days would require much more historic data be shown on the graph.
However, technology website Ars Technica noted that most sales for major games happen within 30 days of release, and so publishers may consider Denuvo a success if it meant a game took significantly longer to be cracked
I personally have absolutely no problem waiting a few months. Sometimes I wait for far longer, because I'm in no hurry and because there's a chance of the game's rough edges being ironed out during that time.
If they see it’s the cause they can decide. From that i can tell there is very little evidence that Denuvo causes problems if well implemented so i doubt there is much incentive to remove it.
> From that i can tell there is very little evidence that Denuvo causes problems if well implemented so i doubt there is much incentive to remove it.
The game will become unplayable after a decade or so if/when Denuvo decides to shut down it's servers. Lots of MMO's from early 2000's are already in this state. DRM like Denuvo is a disaster for long term preservation of games.
I can take a movie from 1940 and watch it today with minimal effort, but the same can't be said for games. It's already difficult with rapidly shifting computing landscape (eg. try playing NFS Porsche Unleased on a Win10 PC), shit like Denuvo just adds insult to the injury for some hypothetical gain which might not even be real.
First of all, a lot of Denuvo games no one cares about, either due to low popularity or because they aren't very different to the older, cracked version. These are a dozen of games that add times in the multiple hundreds of hours, warrantlessly.
Second, cracking groups often voluntarily hold off on cracking games so that they are already updated by then. Often for multiple weeks to a month, where you see the crack to be on yesterday's update.
In reality, I'd estimate cracking times to be around one or two weeks, with some high profile, usable at launch games to be cracked in hours.
I have about 200 games in my library but not a single one with denuvo. With denuvo it you aren't buying a game, but just a permission which can expire at any moment and it's gonna be up to the developer if they want to fix it or not.
Some people even wait until the game appears DRM-free on GOG, because of this.